There are very few situations in life that cannot be improved by a positive attitude and hard work. Saying your prayers each night does not hurt either. It reminds you that as you walk through this life with its challenges you are never alone, and help from upstairs never hurts.
A Ladder, Not Exploitation
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Sure exploitation exists. But, gratitude is sorely lacking in our times. How tough could the western world have it compared to a person living in a disease infested slum in India or unable to find work in some shanty town in Africa. I really want to know what he means by “suffering of the poor”?
My first job as a newly qualified reactor operator on the old submarine now decommissioned: clean the bilge underneath the feedwater regulating valves and steam generator feedwater pumps in engineroom forward. It remained my designated cleaning space till my honorable discharge. That was my white privilege.
Frack these godless liberals straight to hell. They are utterly loathsome and contemptible.
‘Exploitation’ is, in this context, a nonsense term. There are ways to exploit people short of physical coercion, but the ways all involve enticing people with one set of terms of employment and subsequently imposing on them another. There’s room for dispute in some such cases because you can never quite know what a job entails except as you learn and perform it.
It’s another indication, in case you needed one, that Annett is a fundamentally supercilious individual and has no respect for ordinary people going about their day-to-day business and making satisficing choices. Any economy will have low wage jobs which offer little chance of advancement. Those sorts of jobs benefit people who need to learn the workplace and people who need side jobs of limited investment. They are an interlude in the lives of people who hold them. They also benefit people who do not have much human capital and acquire it only slowly.
Annett fancies he lives in Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average.
Note, people in such jobs are not typically suffering because of the tasks they have to perform (with the proviso that working food service at any level can be taxing), but because the jobs do not pay well. Even in those circumstances, ‘suffering’ is a florid way of describing discomfort and insecurity. You can ameliorate that through social policy, but you’re never going to generate a situation where free exchange leaves every person in a situation where they’re are (from their labor alone) free of discomfort and insecurity.
I should note that in 1929, $50.5 billion in wages and salaries were paid out to a working population which numbered about 42 million. That’s $1,200 per worker per year. Per the Bureau of Economic Analysis, nominal prices of consumption goods have increased 13-fold since 1929, so an equivalent purchasing power today would be shy of $16,000 per year. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the least remunerative detailed occupation they track will allow an average practitioner to earn $22,000 in cash wages for a year of f/t work.